When our church celebrated the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the bible back on
Sunday May 1st (the anniversary was May 2nd), one of the things I discovered was that many people who attend church don't have their own personal bible. Another thing I learned was that a lot of people do not know that there are a variety of translations. When asked the question, "what bible translation do you use," people were hard pressed to name a translation other than the KJV.
One of my goals of celebrating the KJV birthday anniversary was not only to celebrate this magnificent translation but to know that we are blessed today to have many readable translations for our study and Christian growth. For example, our church provides pew bibles that utilize the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) which is based on the KJV but uses more modern day language. For a modern translation that uses even more every day language, I recommended for people to purchase "The Message" by Eugene Peterson. For serious bible study, I would go with the NRSV or the New International Version (NIV.)
The advantage of using the NRSV is that the
Wesley Study Bible uses this translation. The Wesley Study Bible includes study notes provided by some of the best Wesleyan scholars in the world.
Bible scholar, Dr. Tom Wright recently gave a lecture on the problems of biblical translation. I have included a portion of his
presentation to help us see some of the issues we face in translating the bible in a language we can understand. The problem is that any bible translator or committee will have biases, even the KJV. It's worth noting that William Tyndale who was the first person to translate the bible into english (prior to the KJV) had a bias against the governing establishment of his day whereas the KJV scholars were translating from a pro-establishment perspective.
There might be many passages which would make the point about style. Frequently, of course, the KJV goes with Tyndale, inch for inch (sometimes indeed into manifest error, as in Romans 6.11, where Paul’s declaration that you are dead to sin but alive to God ‘in Christ Jesus’ has become, in both, ‘through Jesus Christ’, a significant difference). In the Johannine prologue, often quoted as an example of the wonders of the KJV, the only significant difference is that Tyndale refers to the Word as ‘it’, and KJV as ‘he’, until we get to the climax, verse 14, where for Tyndale’s simple word ‘saw’ the King James version has ‘beheld’: ‘we saw the glory of it’, says Tyndale; ‘we beheld his glory’, says the KJV. I wonder if the latter was trying to bring out a possible force of etheasametha? I rather doubt it. I think they were going for sonorous Jacobean prose, which of course they achieved. Famously, of course, the KJV translates agape as ‘charity’. Many grumbled when modern translations replaced it with ‘love’. Not many realised that all the modern translations were doing was reverting to what Tyndale had had in the first place. Not that Tyndale always went for the shorter word. The prodigal son’s elder brother, on returning home, hears ‘musick and dancing’ in the AV; for Tyndale, it was ‘minstrelsy and dancing’. (The Greek is symphonia, which implies a plurality of instruments; perhaps one should translate the phrase as a hendiadys, and render it ‘a dance band’.) More significantly, in line with his ecclesiology (one of the reasons Henry wanted to suppress him), Tyndale regularly translates ekklesia as ‘congregation’ whereas the KJV simply says ‘church’, and renders presbyteros as ‘elder’ rather than ‘priest’. (This was the same impulse that made Tyndale insert little jabs into the margin, such as his famous line on 1 Thessalonians 4.11, where Paul exhorts his readers to ‘study to be quiet, to meddle with your own business, and to work with your own hands’. Tyndale’s comment is pithy: ‘A good lesson for monks and idle friars.’ Not the sort of thing that King James would have wanted to see.) Sometimes, too, Tyndale’s language now seems quaintly old-fashioned to us, partly I suspect because the later popularity of the KJV sustained some usages that might otherwise have dropped out, whereas Tyndale’s words have moved on. When the Holy City comes down from heaven in Revelation 21, we are used to the idea that she is ‘prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’ (KJV); we might raise our eyebrows at Tyndale’s word, that she is prepared as a bride ‘garnished’ for her husband. What King James’s men referred to as ‘the days of unleavened bread’ (Acts 12.3) were for Tyndale ‘the days of sweet bread’; Tyndale clearly saw ‘leaven’ as making bread sour, so that in 1 Corinthians 5 ‘a little leaven soureth the dough’, and the Christian must have ‘the sweet bread of pureness and truth’.
All this, of course, merely illustrates Eliot’s sorrowful observation, that words will not stay in place: they change their meaning, lose old resonances and pick up new ones. Every serious student of Shakespeare or Milton, George Herbert or John Donne, knows that they used words in ways which do not quite correspond to the ways we use them now. And then there is a real problem, as C. S. Lewis pointed out in his Studies in Words. Faced with a word we don’t know, we may look it up in a dictionary. But when it’s a word we use every day, we probably won’t look it up – even though it may have changed its meaning since the time the author was writing. Then we are condemned to misread the word, the sentence, and the passage.
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